Digital photography is gradually replacing traditional photography. Digital photography avoids the need for film and film developing, makes it possible to view the images recorded immediately, allows pictures to be distributed and shared worldwide via the Internet, and enables PC-based manipulation and enhancement. Digital photographs can be produced and easily edited using readily available digital image software applications. Furthermore, in contrast to traditional photography, digital photographs are available for viewing and/or use almost immediately by a personal computer (PC), or by a viewing device. A major contributing factor is the emergence of “network cameras”. Digital cameras equipped with wireless communications are driving photography into new applications and markets.
Consumers also appreciate digital photography because of their preference for the electronic storage, organization and access of images over the traditional storage on static physical albums. After capturing a collection of pictures by means of a digital camera, users often do not immediately catalog the digital images, but instead opt to upload digital images from the digital camera to an electronic storage device or data storage medium for later use. Accordingly, personal computers, web servers, and other electronic image storage devices are increasingly being used to store digital still images.
As with conventional photography, the need to annotate and catalog the ever-increasing number of digital images is of paramount importance to allow ease of access and use. Thus, the task of classifying or cataloging digital still images on storage devices in a way that they will be easily accessible by the user is becoming increasingly important.
Most methods of archiving and storing digital still images typically require users to remember large amounts of information merely to locate pictures that are of particular interest to them. Under systems currently in use, digital images are organized by uploading such images into a computer and manually organizing the images into files and folders (albums) that are then given appropriate titles by the user. Typically the user needs to arrange the images individually into groups that correspond to a specific theme or event. For example, many users currently store their digital images in the hierarchical, directory-based file system structure of personal computers. To find particular photos stored in such a hierarchical directory tree or structure, users must remember the full pathname to the directory in which these photographs were stored. There are other disadvantages to storing digital photographs in a hierarchical, directory-based file system. For example, cataloging and storing groups of photos by categories requires creating different directories for each of the desired categories. This further increases the amount of information that must be remembered by the user in order to locate desired photos.
Other users create large personal databases to organize digital still images on personal computers. Many computer programs have been developed to help users to do this. However, because of the time and effort necessary to review and categorize images, these databases are typically only rarely used and updated. In fact, even when the users would make the investment of time and energy necessary to organize images into databases, the databases are typically organized according to various predefined categories, such as the date of capture, places, events, people. Even when different, user selectable categories could be used, often such categories do not inherently help the user to easily locate images that are of particular importance or value. Instead the user must remember the image, when the image was captured, and/or in which category the user categorized it.
Another standard method of enabling the annotation of digital images is to generate “metadata” within the image. Image metadata is essentially non-picture data that is stored along with picture information in a file and can include such information as the date and time the picture was taken, whether a flash was used, which camera model was used, camera settings such as zoom and exposure, location information such as GPS-derived data, and audio annotations. For example, an image depicting an athletic competition scene can include a short textual description such as “100-m semifinals, heat 1, Athens-2004 Olympic Games”, the name of a person in the image, such as “Gail Devers” or a date and time when the image was captured, such as “03/04/2004 17:28:35”.
Various types of metadata related to images have been standardized. For example, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) group ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11, “Coding of Moving Pictures and Audio”, has published an “MPEG-7 Requirements Document” V.8, No. N2727, March 1999, which defines various types of metadata that can be stored with moving images. Also, the Digital Imaging Group (DIG) has developed the DIG35 metadata standard.
Many Internet image search sites search on metadata content descriptions to locate digital images for display. Some digital cameras automatically generate metadata in the form of a date and time. However, the automatically generated date and time says nothing about the content and/or the event depicted by the digital image and therefore provides only limited assistance in annotating, cataloging and searching for the digital image. For this reason, in the prior art, text entry methods of generating metadata have been applied to annotate large volumes of digital images. Such methods require a person to sort through a database of digital images, using a computer. The user must then store a short textual label within each image, indicating a subject and/or an event depicted by the corresponding digital image. However, the above conventional method is very labor intensive and time consuming. As a result, the step of sorting and labeling captured digital images is often neglected, due to the time required to individually process large volumes of pictures. The photographer therefore accumulates a growing number of images, many of which are not accessible because of the lack of a convenient method of labeling.
Thus, the current systems and methods for annotating, categorizing, and retrieving digital pictures have some drawbacks. Since the successive pictures captured by the user with a digital camera may be quite different and unrelated, the topics of those pictures are listed out of any particular order or context (i.e., without any reference to the reasons or needs that have determined the scene selection). Because of all those deficiencies, while digital cameras are enabling the consumer to take more pictures at a reduced cost, there is a need and an increasing demand for new ways to reference, organize and access these digital images that would be simple and would require a minimum effort by the user.
It would be very helpful and convenient for a user to easily and immediately associate a picture taken, with a subject or category corresponding to the picture.
By example, when a user visits different places on a tour and selects a scene on a visited location and takes a picture, it would be helpful and convenient for the user to easily and immediately associate the picture taken, with information in a travel guide describing the place on which the picture has been taken.
It would be very useful to provide a user means for associating, for instance, the picture taken at a visited town, with the position of this town identified on an electronic map. Conversely, it would be very helpful to provide the user means for associating, for instance, the location of the town, identified on an electronic map, with all pictures taken by the user at that location.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for systems and methods for enhancing digital still images captured by means of a digital camera, with contextual information, whereby information that is immediately meaningful to a user is associated with the images, and selectively available for presentation in conjunction with the visualization of the images.
Conversely, there is also a need in the art for systems and methods for enhancing electronic documents (e.g., web pages, digital maps, electronic guides, etc.), with digital still images captured by means of a digital camera, whereby digital images related to information items that are immediately meaningful to a user are associated, and selectively available for visualization in conjunction with the display of the electronic documents.